Written by Matt Weiss at Posting and Toasting.com
Today was a cool day for the Knicks: they agreed to sign Brandon Jennings to what will probably end up being a very favorable deal and brought back Lance Thomas as well. However, it wasn’t all facially positive, as this happened too:
Langston Galloway is now an Unrestricted Free Agent rather than a Restricted Free Agent, meaning that New York no longer can match other teams’ offers to keep him on the team. Why did they do it, you ask? What’s the end result of these moves, you ask? Good questions. Let me explain in gif form!
All of these salary numbers come with assists from HoopsHype and CBAFAQ except Lance’s salary, which comes from Ian Begley. CBAFAQ also provided me with pretty much all of the knowledge I have about the salary cap because it’s an amazing site.
To break it down in much more boring word form: as of this morning, the Knicks had about $4.37 million remaining in cap space, assuming they renounced their rights toDerrick Williams, Kevin Seraphin, Lou Amundson, and Sasha Vujacic. As you surely know, the Knicks and Brandon Jennings agreed upon a salary of around $5 million this year. You may remember that the CBA places what’s called an “Empty Spot Hold” on teams operating under the salary cap for each player under the required minimum of 12 that the team has rights to. The Knicks held the rights to 9 players before adding Jennings, so they had 3 Empty Spot Holds (each at the first-year player minimum salary of $543,471) on the books. Jennings takes the spot of one of those holds; therefore, his $5 million salary effectively counts for only $4.46 million against the cap. But that means the Knicks were just short on cap space!
So what’d they do? They rescinded Lang’s Qualifying Offer. An RFA’s cap hold is the greater of his QO and whatever his cap hold would be if he were a UFA. Because Lang has been on the Knicks for 2 years, his UFA cap hold would be 130% of his previous salary, or $1.1 million.
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